A WRECK AT SEA.
"The only provisions were a couple of bags of rice, and with care this could be made to last a month. They had very little fresh water, and the old man's ingenuity was set to work to devise means of collecting some. They had a little furnace on some earth in the middle of the boat where they did their cooking, and they had a bag or two of charcoal. Whenever they were engaged in cooking their daily allowance of rice, the padrone caused his companions to dip a couple of tin plates in the sea; when these plates were cooled as much as the sea-water could cool them, they were wiped dry and held in the steam that rose from the rice-kettle, and in this way a few drops of water could be obtained. As soon as they were heated, the water that had accumulated on the plates would be wiped off, and the dipping in the sea would be renewed. Enough water was collected in this way to prevent their dying of thirst, but not enough to save them from considerable suffering. Of course the rice contained a good deal of water which it absorbed in the process of cooking: the usual mode of preparing rice in the East is to steam it above a boiling kettle, and not to place it in the water, after the American manner. Occasionally they were surrounded by flying-fish, but they never caught any, though they tried to do so.
A FLYING-FISH.
"On and on they sailed. Day after day passed with no sign of land, and no ship to bring them assistance. Their coals were exhausted on the seventeenth day; on the next and the next they suffered terrible thirst, because they could no longer make use of their condenser, and the old chief said that if they found no relief by the twentieth day they would have to give up.
"But at ten o'clock in the night of the nineteenth day the boat slid up on a sandy beach, and the party stepped on shore. Fortune willed it that they landed on the beach in front of the French town of Pondicherry; they had seen the lights for an hour or more, but mistook them for stars.
"The boat was pulled up high and dry on the beach, which was deserted at that hour. One man was left to guard it, and the other four, with the old man leading, walked in single file through the streets of Pondicherry in search of assistance.